


a handful of magic beans

by fruitbattery



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/F, canon-typical shitty parents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-19 03:50:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22304797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitbattery/pseuds/fruitbattery
Summary: Beau meets a mysterious stranger with something to offer her. Jack and the Beanstalk AU.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Marion Lavorre | Ruby of the Sea & Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	a handful of magic beans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Royalwriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Royalwriter/gifts).



It’s not that Beau isn’t _aware_ of her family’s dire financial straits, theoretically speaking. She’s nineteen, she’s smart, she can figure shit out. Still, though, it does come as a bit of a shock when Thoreau shakes her awake far too early in the morning with a request to bring the family’s last barrel of wine down into town and try and sell it.

“I’m sorry, what?”

Her dad has never been very good at hiding his annoyance, and she watches as his facade stretches particularly thin this morning. “Beauregard, you are to take our last barrel into Kamordah and sell it. I do not want to see you return with any less than twenty gold in hand, and the wine disposed of.”

Beau just gapes. “Our _last_ barrel? And what the fuck happened to the other half dozen? They grow legs or something?”

Thoreau scowls. “I would appreciate it if you took me a little more seriously, Beauregard. Not every one of my business transactions happens to pass under your watchful eyes. Get dressed. And watch your language.”

He turns on his heel and leaves the room, shutting the door with a snap. Beau rolls over again and buries her face in her pillow. _Ugh._

Twenty minutes later, though, she’s trudging down the mountain, out of their little hamlet towards Kamordah proper, letting the wine set the pace as she leans back against the weight of the cart in front of her. The sun’s just broken the horizon, and its heat and light output is rapidly increasing. Beau wipes her brow and hopes for a milder day than is clearly coming.

Half an hour into the journey, Beau’s wish has _not_ come true. The day promises to be miserably hot, and Beau is absolutely straining to keep the cart from running away downhill. Each stone that pokes at her feet through her sandals feels as though it’s stabbing all the way through. The morning is wearing on, though, and so Beau picks up the pace, not even looking at the path ahead as she kicks pebbles off the road and fumes at nothing in particular. Finally, Beau realizes she’s not far from the market square, and hurries up even more to get the cart onto flat ground.

Of course, the road picks that moment to produce a particularly large rut, the perfect size for Beau’s foot to fall into at an awkward, painful ankle. Beau swears loudly, sweaty hands slipping off the cart handles and arms wheeling wildly before she falls back on her ass with an unsatisfying thump, cart beginning to pick up speed without her. _Shit._

Beau _tries_ to leap to her feet and follow the cart, she really does. Every time she gets halfway up, though, her ankle gives a painful jolt that sends her back to the ground. The cart, meanwhile, has disappeared down the hill. _Shit. Fuck. Balls. Ass._ As Beau finally manages to drag herself upright and totter unsteadily down the hill after the cart, the only thought running through her head is of her father. _He is going to KILL me._ Images of the cart and barrel smashing through someone’s house, or bowling over some little kid, or hitting a tree and smashing open, all dance through Beau’s mind as she hobbles towards her assumed fate. She almost wouldn’t have noticed the cart, sitting safely at the side of the road, if the person beside it hadn’t called out.

“Having some trouble, miss?”

Beau jumps a little and turns to the source of the voice. She sees a young man, not older than his early twenties, dressed rather too smartly for the small town and with a shock of red hair cascading past his shoulders. He’s standing on the other side of her cart, elbows propped on the barrel inside, looking at her with a bit of a smirk. 

Beau crosses her arms. “What about it?”

The dude’s smirk grows… smirkier. “Well, I saved your wine.”

Beau just stands there. “And?”

The young man is grinning now. “Well, young lady, what do you say when someone fixes your mistakes for you?”

Beau feels her cheeks go red. “Thank you, _sir_ ,” she spits out through teeth gritted in pain, “now may I please have it back?”

“Certainly! If you can push it.”

“Fine.”

Beau limps up to the back of the cart and _heaves._ It’s slow progress, only pushing with one half of her body, but she won’t let this unnecessarily smug stranger see her fail. What’s his deal, anyway? Eventually, though, after about twenty feet and an entire minute, she has to stop, breathing heavily, and definitely _not_ looking at the stranger.

“Need some help?”

She doesn’t have to turn around to tell who’s asking. “Fuck off.”

Behind her, she feels the man back away. “No need to be rude. I can help you, you know.”

Beau turns just her head to look behind her. The stranger is holding up a roll of bandage.

***

Twenty minutes later, Beau is on her way to market with a surprisingly well-wrapped ankle. She’ll have to get it checked out, but for now she can at least use it to walk. The mysterious man is nowhere to be seen– she’d looked down from the sky to stop avoiding his gaze and thank him when he was done, but there’d been no one there. _Sneaky fuck._ As Beau nears the market district, the familiar chatter slips towards her like a wave off the sea, engulfing her and pulling her into the midst of the shoppers and merchants. The smell of exquisitely spiced food draws her nose, and she pays a few copper for some kind of meat wrap thing before setting off on a round of the main square. 

Beau feels a little silly, passing by the other wineries’ stalls– they’ve got samples, and small bottles, and the only enormous kegs they have are just being used to fill smaller vessels. No one's gonna want to buy an entire barrel. She should’ve brought some bottles, at least. It’s becoming rapidly clear, hour after hour, that no one’s even looking at her massive ware, and she eventually finds herself sitting atop the barrel, swinging her legs in sheer boredom as the sun shows signs of setting and the stalls begin to come down.

She’s just wondering how the hell she’s gonna get this behemoth back up the hill, much less how to explain her failure to her father, when someone saunters up to her.

“Well, if it isn’t a familiar face! Beauregard, wasn’t it?”

Beau jumps. Standing in front of her is the infuriating stranger. “What’s it to you? Wait– how did you know my name? Fuck, what are you even doing here?”

“Why, I’m here to buy, of course! What are you selling today?”

 _Ughhhhhh._ Beau launches into her pitch about the flavor profile or what-fuckin’-ever of the wine– fruity, earthy red, aged for seven years, blah blah blah– but she can’t help being uncomfortable. Who the hell does this guy think he is, calling her by name? Creepy ass! He has no right, she decides.

“Well, that sounds just perfect! My kind of wine.” He rocks on his toes, hands behind his back. “I’m afraid I don’t have any money though.”

Beau wants to scream in his fake-sheepish face, give him what-for for wasting her time and being a shit, and send him on his way. Preferably with his metaphysical tail between his legs. She’s just opened her mouth, though, when he speaks again.

“I do have something better, though.”

Beau sighs. “Fine. What is it? It better be something I can feed my family with. Can’t make a living on advertising or whatever.”

The man smiles again, somehow even creepier than the last time. “True, what i have may not seem like much. But I can assure you, if you take this deal, you and your family will never go hungry again.” He reaches into a pocket in his ridiculously billowy pants and holds out the contents for Beau to see. In his palm are what look like three dried kidney beans.

Beau gives him a long, hard look. “Are you fucking kidding me.”

The stranger’s smile does not drop as he replies. “I never kid, Beauregard. What I can offer you is beyond your wildest dreams.”

***

Look, it’s not that Beau _hadn’t_ wanted to piss off her dad. But it’d also been really late, and she’s really wanted to be rid of this fucking barrel and the smug stranger, so she was trudging uphill with three fucking beans in her pocket and nothing else to show for an entire day of…. well, nothing. The walk had seemed shorter without struggling to keep a heavy cart from running away, and in less time than she’d have liked, Beau was coming in through the front door. Thoreau had been sitting in his straight-backed chair by the fire, reading a book, and he’d looked up as she entered. “Ah. Beauregard. What did you get for the wine?”

It’s inevitable, really, that she’s here; locked in the yard without supper was about how she’d expected this evening to go. It’s a nice warm night, at least, and she’s used to sleeping without a blanket under the stars– sometimes the roof is the only place to go when your room’s warm and stuffy, you know? Despite the lack of surprise, though, Beau seethes, kicking tufts of grass aside as she stalks past them, back and forth, back and forth. She draws the beans out of her pocket. “Fuck you,” she says, staring at them. “Little piece of shit,” she says, not talking to them. “Fuck.” She throws them over her shoulder and spits on them, a derisive imitation of one of her mother’s old good-luck charms. 

Finally wearing herself out after what seems like hours, Beau stretches out on her back, gazing up at the stars. All the anger seems to flow out of her in the face of such vast beauty. This far outside of Kamordah proper, the stars are bright and numerous, and Beau is fond of tracing out the constellations she remembers from one of her father’s books, and making up her own as well. She has a suspicion they wouldn’t look the same from up there, but Beau so badly wants to escape up there with the menagerie in the sky; foraging with the Owlbear and her child, running through the woods with the Huntsman…..

It’s not clear to Beau when she fell asleep, but the night is much cooler now, and the moon has risen, bathing the yard in a gorgeous silvery glow. The stars haven’t moved, of course they haven’t, but some aren’t visible anymore…..

Beau leaps to her feet. There’s something blotting out a sliver of sky, something almost tree-like in its thickness, but impossibly tall…. she looks to her left and freezes. 

There’s something _massive_ growing in her yard. Far too thick for Beau to wrap her arms around, three enormous vines are erupting from the ground and climbing far, far into the sky, seemingly with no support whatsoever. Beau knows gardens, she knows what a beanstalk looks like, but there haven’t been any beans planted in this part of the yard, and besides, no bean could grow that big.

_Wait._

_**Fuck.** _

She knew there was something fishy about that guy, him and his stupid little green cape, why did he even have these beans, what kind of person just carries shit like that around, and she’s walking towards the beanstalk. Walking, and staring longingly up it, at the top that seems to disappear into nowhere, and with barely a thought of her parents sleeping soundly inside the house, she grips the nearest of the three vines and begins to climb. 

The going is easy, at first. The vines are braided tightly enough around each other that there are plenty of hand- and footholds, and for the first hundred feet or so, the air is relatively calm. 

Then she gets above the surrounding hilltops, and the wind starts up.

It’s gentle at first, not much more than a light breeze, but it’s cold, and Beau regrets not trying to grab warmer clothes before the door was locked. The speed of the breeze picks up quickly as she climbs higher, though, and soon she’s _freezing,_ teeth chattering in a way the weather in the Kamordah area never really manages to make her. Two hundred feet, three hundred, and bits of wispy cloud are starting to close in around her.

Beau frowns. She’s far too low for any sort of clouds to be forming, she’s sure of it, and besides, the night had been clear when she started. She chances a look at the ground and shrieks a little, clinging tighter to the vine, nails leaving sticky little half-moon cuts in the fleshy surface. The ground is farther away than from the top of the highest hills, and she’s sure that even if her parents were right below her, she wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a crowd. In the distance, she can see Kamordah, only the occasional lighted window of some late-night worker indicating there’s a town there at all.

And then the clouds close in fully around her, and Beau can’t see the ground anymore. Also, she’s no longer cold, somehow, the clouds seemingly protecting her from the worst of the wind.

Not being able to see the ground anymore feels final, somehow. Beau sighs, unsticks her hands from the vine, blows on each of them in turn, and starts to climb again. Wherever she’s going, it’s probably better than where she’s left behind.

***

Beau doesn’t know how long it takes for the world to begin lightening, but it must not have been long before dawn when she woke up, because she’s still climbing tirelessly when it begins to get light. The cloud around her hasn’t dissipated, but it starts to gain a faint rose-pink hue, until she’s literally climbing through a sunrise, pastel rainbows all around her. Beau’s never really been one for aesthetics, but even she has to admit it’s beautiful. Birds are chirping all around her, and–

Wait. She’s gotta be, like, a mile in the air, right? How the fuck are there birds around?

Just as Beau thinks her incredulous thought, the clouds around her start to dissipate, drifting off to wherever fucky place they came from, and Beau’s head sticks out the top of them. And she gasps in wonder.

From Beau’s perspective, she’s sticking out of the ground in what appears to be a city made of clouds. Enormous houses stretch off down what looks like a road, from her left to her right, while in front of her is a particularly nice mansion. It’s fairly typical of a richer Exandrian city, if not for the fact it’s easily three times the height and width of a typical human house, with doors and windows to match. The beanstalk she’s clinging to ends about thirty feet up from the road in a spray of gorgeous purple flowers. Beau scrambles up out of the road, still clinging to the beanstalk and gazing in wonder at the impossible sight. Everything seems to be sculpted of fluffy white clouds, shaped into bricks or whatever other materials as appropriate. Even the flowerbeds and lawns seem to be shaped out of cloud and tinted to match whatever they’re sculpted to resemble.

Beau is broken from her reverie when the front door of the cloud mansion in front of her opens, and the largest woman she’s ever seem steps out. Seventeen or so feet tall, with bright red skin and horns like a ram’s, she gasps at the beanstalk in the middle of the street.

“Another beanstalk! What luck!” The giant woman notices Beau staring down at her a moment later. “Dear, you can come down. It’s safe.” As Beau does so, shaky and still gazing around in wonderment, the woman keeps muttering to herself. “A human! A human! We haven’t had one of those in a _while_.” The woman seems to snap out of it, and focuses her gaze again on Beau. “You must have been climbing for so long, dear. Wouldn’t you like to come inside for breakfast?”

Beau’s sure she’s died and gone…… well, somewhere. Inside the house, everything seems fairly solid, not like it’s made of clouds, but it’s all about three times as big as she’s used to. The woman– Marion, as she tells Beau– has to grab her and lift her up into a chair, since her limbs are so exhausted from climbing the beanstalk, and the chair’s seat is higher than Beau is tall. Beau’s still staring at the giant cutlery, trying to figure out how she’s supposed to sit down and still reach the table, when another giant figure comes through the door. This one is shorter, maybe 14 feet, and has blue skin rather than red, but with very similar horns to Marion. She looks to be about Beau’s age, and she’s currently yawning and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“This is my daughter, Jester. Jester, Beauregard.”

“Please, call me Beau.” Beau reaches out a hand to shake on instinct, but quickly realizes there’s no way to reach Jester to shake, as she’s trapped in a glorified high chair. She settles for a wave instead. _Fuck. She’s **pretty**_.

“Hi, Beau! I’m Jester. It’s been a while since we’ve had a new visitor so close to us! I’m really glad you did though, it gets sort of boring.” As if suddenly horrified with what she’d said, Jester’s head whips back to Marion. “Not that I don’t love you, mama, but there’s no one younger than, like, forty on this block. Except for me. And now except for Beau!”

Beau gives a halfhearted smile, while Marion laughs and explains to Jester, “Sapphire, I don’t think Beau is going to stay very long. I’m sure she has a family who miss her very much, down on the ground.”

At this, Beau can’t stifle her own laugh. “Yeah, well. I can’t say I’m gonna stay forever, but my parents? Not exactly the greatest to go back to. Only reason I climbed that thing at night was my parents locked me out of the house–”

She’s said too much. Both Jester and Marion look utterly flabbergasted. Marion speaks first, with barely concealed fury, not turning around from the stove. “I’m sorry, they did _what?_ ” 

“It wasn’t a big deal, I like sleeping in the yard.”

Jester seems frozen in place, uncomfortable, not sure whether or not to reach for Beau to comfort her. “But you know that’s, like, suuuuper not-normal, right? Like, you _have_ to know that.” 

Beau just shifts uncomfortably in her too-tall seat. “Um.”

Marion turns from the stove, holding a pot of….. something. “Well, let’s not worry about that for now. You look like you haven’t had a good meal in ages.”

Beau nods, suddenly famished. Whatever stew Marion has, it smells fucking _amazing_. She ladles it into the giant bowl in front of Beau, doing her best to estimate the smaller portion size, and serves a normal bowl for herself and a smaller bowl for Jester. She sets the pot down, and opens up the oven, sliding a few different pieces of pastry onto a platter and setting it in the middle of the table before sitting down herself. “Beau, I hope you like what we have to offer, it isn’t much.” Beau’s already trying to get as much stew as she can in her mouth, but her spoon is bigger than her hand, so it isn’t really working, and also she’s still standing up, because the top of the table is at approximately eye level.

Jester laughs. “Oh, wait.” Suddenly, Beau’s spoon is human-sized, and the chair legs seem to lengthen, putting the chair at the right height for Beau to sit in it. Beau looks up in wonder at the pink shimmer lingering around Jester’s fingers. 

“Holy _sh–_ holy crap! How did you do that?”

Jester laughs. “Oh, the Traveler gives me all sorts of powers! Have you heard about the Traveler?”

Marion looks like she wants to say something, but she cuts herself off as Beau responds with genuine interest. “I haven’t, is he, like, a god or something?”

Jester _grins,_ and Beau can’t stop staring. In the soft morning light filtering through the front windows of the house, Jester’s sleepy violet eyes shine like pools of molten amythest– _Keep it together, Lionett. This is no time to be uselessly gay._ “Yeah! He’s, like, this suuuper awesome god, and he comes to me and keeps me company when I’m sad, which isn’t much these days but it used to be more cause my mama would go out for her work a lot. He’d come to me, and he’d show me things he could do, and then he’d tell me to try, and I could do them too. Like this!”

Marion reaches out a hand, but before she can do anything, Jester mutters a few words Beau doesn’t recognize, and her eyes flash pink, and then there’s a _bang_ as all the windows in the house slam open. Beau nearly falls out of the chair as the fresh morning breeze blows in through a half dozen windows, and one of the panes actually falls out of the frame and shatters on the floor.

“Jester,” Marion sighs, “please clean that up. And do try to be a little more careful next time.” 

Jester looks only mildly sheepish, but hops down and scurries to the broken window anyway. “Sorry, Mama! You know I love showing visitors my magic!” Jester kneels down and sweeps the broken glass into a pile with her bare hands, and Beau winces as she leans over the table to watch, but Jester’s clearly an old hand at this. Her fingers move over the pile in practiced swirls, tracing lines not unlike the cracks that must’ve raced through the pane the moment before it fell, her eyes glowing pink again. And, miraculously, the window begins to come together right there on the floor. As if solving a puzzle, the edge of the rectangular pane forms first, clear shards flying up from the floor to fill it in in a beautiful, deadly dance. Within a minute, the pane is whole again.

Jester stands up, holding the intact window in her hands and looking pleased with herself. Beau’s jaw is on the floor. She’s heard of people who can do those kinds of things, but it’s always been said to be exceedingly rare, mostly resigned to whispers and the occasional, well, fairy tale. Beau’s pretty sure Jester isn’t a fairy.

Pretty sure.

“Good job, Jester,” calls Marion, emerging from another room, where she’s clearly just finished shutting the last of the windows. “Now, I appreciate your excitement–” here, she takes the pane of glass from Jester’s hands and starts fitting it back into the frame– “but I’m sure there are other ways you can show our guests what you can do.”

Jester thinks, hard, as she’s resettling at the table again. “Well, most of what he taught me is healing…. Beau, are you hurt at all?”

Beau starts a little as she remembers her ankle. “Uh…..” Come to think of it, that walk back up the hill should not have been as easy as it was with a twisted ankle, let alone climbing a beanstalk for what felt like hours. She reaches down and prods at her bandaged ankle. No pain. “Well, I thought I was, but it must not have been as bad as I thought. What else could you show me?”

Jester lights up. “Oh! Well, here. I can do this!” Beau blinks, and suddenly her own face is staring back at her. She nearly falls out of her chair, again. Logically, the person in the chair across from her is still Jester, but everything about her looks identical to Beau, from her face to her clothes to her body structure. Even looking, like, really hard, Beau can’t tell the difference.

Beau sits back in her seat and whistles a little. “That’s pretty impressive, yeah.” She looks down at her bowl, suddenly not really sure what to say. “I’m not sure why I’m taking this so well, if I’m being honest. There’s a cloud city above us, which I didn’t know about until today, full of giant horned people–”

“Tieflings!” Jester pipes up–

“–who can do magic–”

“–not all of us can do magic, Beau, and some of us are other races–”

“–fine, but what I’m saying is, why aren’t I freaking out?” Beau looks around the room. It’s a comfortable kitchen, not too dissimilar to her own house, but now she realizes what’s different (other than the size, of course). It looks lived in. A sweater is draped over the back of a chair, there’s a messy stack of cookbooks on the counter, and someone’s water glass is in the sink. Beau knows her father wouldn’t allow any of that to happen, or if it did, she’d be the one to clean it no matter whose mess it was.

Marion leans over and puts a giant hand on Beau’s shoulder. “I got the feeling that you were…… not the happiest at home. Now, I’m no paragon of motherhood–”

“You’re the best, Mama, don’t lie!”

Marion smiles. “–but I do my best to provide for Jester and myself. Our little family. If you ever need anything– and I mean anything– a place to stay, a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on– you just let me know.”

Beau’s kind of in disbelief. “Look, that’s very kind of you, ma’am. But why? Why me? You just met me!”

Marion offers Beau a hand down from the now too-tall chair, and Beau accepts. Marion leads her through a door into a cozy living room, and kneels down so she’s only a bit taller than Beau. “Beau, I know what it looks like for a parent to not take care of a child. I see it in your face when you interact with me. You tread too carefully, fearing punishment.” Marion takes a deep breath. “I saw that, and made it my goal not to let that happen to anyone else. You are welcome in my home whenever you would like. The Beanstalk–” and Beau can hear the emphasis in her voice– “comes for a reason.” 

Marion’s intensity drops, a little, and Beau really looks at her for the first time up close. She appears to be about the age of Beau’s mother, although she doesn’t know how tea- tie– _giants_ age, and Beau wants to know this woman, know her household and her personality ~~and her daughter~~. So she asks. “What do you mean? Has the beanstalk come before?”

Marion nods. “I won’t keep you, but suffice it to say, whenever they do, they bring someone in need.” She gets a bit of a far-off look. and doesn’t speak for a minute.

Beau pipes up, practically brimming with curiosity. “If I come back, will you tell me about some of the others?”

Marion nods. “I can see your curious spark, Beau. My Jester has that too. I believe you two can give each other valuable perspectives, and perhaps you can even give her a friend.” She sighs. “I….. have perhaps not been the best…. at facilitating friendships for Jester. No other teenagers live around here, and I think she’s been lonely….”

Without thinking about it, Beau’s arms come out as if to give Marion a hug. She draws them back in almost instantly– kinda hard to hug a wall, and that’s basically what Marion is to her– but Marion sees, and wraps her arms tightly around Beau. It’s…. nice. Beau isn’t normally a huggy person, but there’s something about hugging Marion that’s comforting in a way she’s never felt. It’s _nice_. Beau thinks that maybe that shouldn’t be the last time she hugs someone like that.

Marion wipes a tear from her eye discreetly before standing up and gesturing Beau back into the kitchen. “Jester, dear,” she calls from behind Beau, “please pack a bag of food for Miss Beau.”

Beau can see Jester’s face fall as she reenters the kitchen. “But Mama– Beau, are you leaving already?”

Beau’s heart drops a little. There’s Jester, looking so earnest and upset, expressing a desire for Beau to stay there with her. Beau shakes her head a little to clear it. “Jester, I have a lot to process. I’ve gotta get back home to my parents.” She tries to put on a big smile. “But I’ll see you again! There is no fuckin’– sorry Marion– there is no way I’m just leaving this place forever.” Beau pauses for a second, debating. “I….. like it here. A lot.”

Jester smiles, and disappears through another door. Marion turns to Beau. “You keep that promise, you hear?” Beau can’t do anything but nod. 

“Yes, ma’am.” She doesn’t normally call strangers ma’am, doesn’t normally look them in the eye, either. But it feels right. 

***

Jester’s waving arms dip out of sight as an exhausted Beau starts down the beanstalk, letting the weird cloud carry most of her weight as she heads towards the ground below. She’s sure of it, now– her ankle is completely healed. The bandage flaps in the breeze, once, twice, and sails away out of the cloud. Beau thinks she sees someone out of the corner of her eye, smiling, but when she whips her head around, there’s no one there.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Up 2 U by Walk the Moon, chapter title from Giants in the Sky from Into the Woods, because I am nothing if not a cliché.


End file.
